monday

although we have been at the school since wednesday of last week... today was the first day of "all staff" orientation. it was nice to finally meet everyone that will be teaching with us. in total, there are close to 25 classroom teachers and teaching assistants. throw in another 12 administrative staff (including security guards, office staff, etc) and here at bishkek international school we have a fairly large group of people for such a small school (around 100 students).

we spent the morning in meetings covering policies, etc and the afternoon setting up our classroom (photos to come soon).

for lunch, jennifer stayed here on campus while i went out with a couple of teachers to eat some "local" korean food. it was... interesting. the restaurant was very nice and clean and looked just like something you would find in the states. the dish i ordered (something with noodles, veggies and mystery meat) was served cold. i was a bit thrown off by this as i am use to soupy type dishes being served warm. after getting use to the taste (ok... i didn't really get too use to it) it ended up being pretty good... going down.

coming back up and out has been a different story all together as a couple of hours later i got sick at the school. but for the record... i have been here since august 15th and this is my first time getting sick!

the evening ended with some couchsurfers crashing at our apartment. if you don't know... couchsurfing.com is a site where people can offer to host or ask to be hosted at your house. the site really caters to backpackers who are trying to travel on the cheap. a pretty cool concept and program.

so we ended up with two girls who were traveling the world together (one from belgium and the other from france) and a guy from belgium. really cool folks. jen made us all a wonderful pasta dinner (with sauce handmade from fresh tomatoes) with cheese bread. afterwards, we shares some ice cream and watched the movie "juno" together (as they had all been on the road for several months, they were starving for entertainment!). all in all a great night. they are taking off today to get trekking in the local mountains and then coming back to stay for the weekend as we have plans to celebrate the kyrgyzstan independence day celebrations.